A busy Wednesday morning on Bishopsgate in London and Sgt Stuart Ford of the City of London police is pointing out possible offenders. “He’s not pedalling,” he says, indicating a man on a bike on the other side of the road. “Still not pedalling, but he is going downhill, he might be all right. I’d still pull him over and have a look.”
Not today, though, because the non-pedalling possible offender is heading north, while Ford’s team – two members of the cycle response unit he set up two years ago and leads – are facing south on the opposite side of the road. A lot of the unit’s work centres on illegal e-bikes; they have seized 212 so far this year.
News comes over the radio that PCs Harry Rose and David Parker have stopped someone they suspect is on an illegal e-bike, so we find them with a delivery rider in the familiar green livery of Uber Eats. The man, whose name is Mahede Hasan, says his bike has pedals, and the power of the electric motor is 250 watts, which he thought was allowed.
Ford tilts the bike on its stand and twists the throttle on the right handlebar. “That’s illegal for a start,” he says. “You should pedal to make the motor work.” The bike doesn’t go anywhere, because the spinning back wheel is off the ground, but the speedometer climbs – 20, 30, 40, 50, 52km/h. That’s about 32mph. “What do you think the top speed of this bike should be, with pedal assist?” he asks Hasan, who doesn’t know, so Ford tells him. “15.5mph [25km/h]. This is basically a motorcycle.”
E-bikes aren’t illegal per se, and you will no doubt have noticed their increased popularity in UK cities, including the proliferation of rental ones (you might have views on them blocking pavements, or the fact that the ever-present background noise of urban Britain is the click click click of a kid on a stolen Lime bike, but that is a different issue). To be legal, which the rental bikes are, an e-bike needs to meet certain criteria. These include having pedals that can be used to drive the bike, an electric motor with a maximum power output of 250W, and a maximum assisted speed of 15.5mph. That doesn’t mean they can’t go faster, if you pedal hard or go downhill, just that the motor won’t help above that speed. Essentially, they’re bicycles with a bit of help, and that’s how they’re treated: you don’t need a licence, registration or insurance to ride one.
The trouble is a lot of e-bikes aren’t legal to ride on the road, but they are very easy and cheap to get hold of. While the officers complete their paperwork, Hasan, 21, tells me he bought his bike new, on the internet, for £600. “I got it because I do, like, eight or nine hours a day, and if I’m only pedalling I’m going to get more tired. An e-bike makes it more comfortable.” Originally from Bangladesh, he has put a sticker showing a map of the country on the front mudguard.
He assumed the bike was legal because there was nothing on the website he bought it from that said it wasn’t. “If it’s not, how do they sell it to people?” He says that if he’d known he was breaking the law, he wouldn’t have stopped when they pulled him over. The cycle response unit operates on pedal bikes. “I believe they wouldn’t catch me,” he says.
The officers tell him they’re seizing the bike, and he asks if he can keep the detachable battery, which they allow, while he cancels the lunch order he was due to deliver. “It’s going to affect my account because when you accept a job, that means you’re committing to delivering to the customer. If you don’t, that’s your problem, not the company’s.”
Back at Bishopsgate police station, Ford shows me the pound with some of the other bikes they’ve seized over the past few days (from here they get taken away to be crushed). There’s one that’s probably 500 or 750W. The pedals aren’t even connected to the chain to turn the wheel – it’s not even pretending to be a bicycle. Several have been converted from regular pedal bikes, using kits, also readily available. Again, not illegal in itself, so long as the motor is not bigger than 250W – you can generally tell from the size of the hub on the rear wheel. A few seconds on my phone, and I’ve found a 3,000W conversion kit, made in China, that I can have delivered for £142.59. I can’t see anything about it being illegal to ride on the road in the UK.
Ford estimates that about three-quarters of the illegal e-bikes they deal with are ridden by food delivery riders. They’re getting wise to the clampdown. “They’ll come down the road, see us, spin round, that’s usually a giveaway they’re on an illegal bike. We’ll then try to catch up with them if we can.”
E-bikes – usually high-powered, ready-made ones – are also the vehicle of choice for gangs of phone snatchers, Ford adds: “Because they’re so quick, and they can’t be detected because they’ve got no licence plates and [if the riders are wearing helmets] you can’t see who they are.”
What about the people who aren’t committing any other crimes, who just want to get around a bit quicker, most likely in order to make a half-decent wage? The issue is, says Ford, that these illegal e-bikes are in effect motorbikes. “These people have passed no test, have no road training and don’t have the road skills. They just get on and ride around without insurance, tax, the bike not conforming to lights and everything else it should conform to, it’s not registered with the DVLA, all these things.”
Ford shows me another one they’ve just impounded; it looks more like a motorbike than a bicycle. He invites me to lift up one end to feel the weight of it. “Imagine if that hit you – or a child – at 30, 40mph.” The fastest one they’ve seized was capable of 70mph.
Christine White doesn’t know how fast the e-bike that hit her dad was going. On the morning of 6 July 2023, 91-year-old army veteran Jim Blackwood was sorting the bins outside his house in Rochester, Kent, when a man on an e-bike coming down the hill ran into him. White, who was staying with her parents at the time, ran out in her pyjamas. “Dad had managed to get up and was hanging on next door’s gate,” she tells me.
It didn’t initially seem that bad – Jim had a scrape on his cheek and was bleeding from his finger. But in hospital they found he had internal injuries – a bleed on the brain and an artery in his kidney was ruptured. After an operation, there were more complications, a heart attack and infections. He ended up spending three months in hospital before being sent home for palliative care. He died on 13 October. Before the accident, Jim had been in great health. “I expected him to get to 100, no problem,” White says. The rider is now awaiting trial on charges of manslaughter and “causing bodily harm by wanton or furious driving”. He has not yet entered a plea.
White thinks the way e-bikes are classified should be updated, even legal e-bikes (she doesn’t know if the one that hit her dad was legal or not). “For me, an e-bike is no different to a 50cc moped, except it’s electric rather than petrol-powered. The government has been far too slow to bring in proper regulations. They should need insurance, and a registration plate, be identifiable.”
Her father had four grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. She says her mum has trouble coming to terms with the fact that her husband, who served with the British army for 26 years, in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and before that clearing mines in Malaysia, is no longer around. “Mum says he survived all that and then he gets killed outside his front door.”
Fabian Hamilton, Labour MP for Leeds North, calls the danger posed by illegal e-bikes “a crisis hiding in plain sight”. He’s chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Cycling and Walking, which this summer published a report on the issue. Its findings highlighted a surge in battery fires caused by unregulated e-bike conversion kits, low-cost batteries and poor-quality imports. In 2023, the London fire brigade attended 179 incidents involving e-bike or e-scooter fires. That December, 28-year-old Mohsin Janjua died when his e-bike battery caught fire at his home in Bradford. The APPGCW report also highlights the online marketplaces selling unsafe products with little or no oversight, enforcement or legal liability. “It never ceases to amaze me that you can sell a product that is illegal to be used on the roads,” Hamilton tells me.
He’s a big fan of legitimate e-bikes, and has a British-made folding one himself. “I love it. When I finish this call I’m going to get on my e-bike and ride home. It will never catch fire because it is properly designed and has proper battery management systems.” And if he’s rushing home, at 15.5mph the electrical assistance will cut out. “I do go faster than that, but by using the muscles in my legs.” It cost £1,600 – cheaper than the equivalent Brompton, he says, but almost certainly not in Mahede Hasan’s price range.
The exploitation of gig-economy riders, who are incentivised to use faster, illegal bikes to meet delivery targets, is also underlined in the report. “Deliveroo has been sold for £2.9bn to an American conglomerate [a takeover by rival company DoorDash], and that’s off the back of the most shocking exploitation of some of these riders, most of whom daren’t give their names because they’re in the country illegally,” says Hamilton. “What happens, I’m told, is that people who pay people smugglers to get into this country are told they can pay the money back by taking this job for the next three years and earning their way back out of it. So it’s even worse for them, because they don’t even get to keep the paltry amount they get paid for the deliveries that they make, which they have to do illegally. It’s a circle, isn’t it? And you’ve got to break that circle somewhere.”
He compares it to what was going on in the 19th century. “When the Factory Acts were passed, MPs said we’re going to need to have inspectors to enforce them or they’ll just be ignored by the exploiters. So they introduced the Factory Inspectorate, which stopped children being exploited in factories to earn vast profits for the owners. This is a new form of industrial revolution where the most vulnerable are being exploited but now they’re foreigners, people who have come here for asylum or economic migration.”
Hamilton, and the report, call for a number of things: for online retailers to withdraw unsafe e-bikes from sale; making retailers legally accountable for unsafe listings; ending the loophole that allows them to be sold under the guise of off-road use; and a safety Kitemark for legal bikes. Additionally, it calls for enforcing compliance from delivery companies, requiring them to run checks on the bikes used by couriers; and rights and protections for gig-economy riders.
Celestino Pereira, originally from Brazil, came to the UK – legally – in 2019, and began working in London as a rider for Deliveroo. “You only need a phone and a bicycle, just show the number and pick up the order, no need to speak English, so it was good for me.”
Pereira began on a pedal bike, but found it impossible to make the minimum wage, so when he had enough money he got an e-bike – a road-legal one, for about £500 – and was initially able to get a few more orders. But three weeks after getting it, the e-bike was stolen outside a block of flats in south London.
That’s when he decided to give up on e-bikes. He thinks the legal ones aren’t suited to real-world working conditions. “Many models don’t allow for battery replacements, so riders have to sit idle for hours, waiting to recharge. When replacement batteries are an option, they are so expensive.” Pereira got a petrol moped, which meant he had to do CBT (compulsory basic training), have a licence, get insurance, all of which cost him money. He estimates that about 70% of food delivery riders in London are on illegal e-bikes, and he understands why. “They’re cheaper than legal ones and are faster, so you can complete more orders, and they can have more batteries so you don’t have to stop to recharge.”
Pereira estimates that now, with his moped, he makes about £11 an hour. He knows people who are struggling to make seven or eight pounds. “The companies have no interest in the wellbeing of the workers, it’s about minimising the costs and maximising returns.” As soon as his son is old enough to go to and from school on his own, he will try to find other work, he says.
A Deliveroo spokesperson says: “We take our responsibilities regarding road safety in the communities we operate in very seriously. All riders are provided with road safety information when they join, and we have a number of partnerships in place to give riders access to safe and affordable e-bike rentals. We will investigate and stop working with the rider if they are in breach of their obligations to follow the rules of the road.
“Each rider has a minimum guaranteed rate of pay of £12.30 an hour for the period on an order, but in practice most orders pay more than this.
An Uber Eats spokesperson says: “Uber Eats is fully committed to tackling illegal work and the criminal networks who are often behind it. We have taken a number of steps, including introducing state-of-the-art identity and document-video verification technology, but we are constantly reviewing our tools and finding new ways to make sure that everyone on our platform has the right to work.”
And so back to Hasan, now speaking to me a couple of weeks later from the flat he shares with his parents in east London. His seized bike will probably have been crushed by now. He was also fined £300 and given six points on his driving licence. Again, he stresses that he didn’t know the bike was illegal, and can’t understand how online platforms are allowed to sell them. He also questions the £300 fine. “The first time, if people don’t know, they should give you a warning.”
Hasan has got another e-bike; he needs to work. This one is legal, he was assured at the shop: 250W, 15.5mph limit, no throttle. It cost £900, he’s paying in instalments, and it’s going to take a while.
Hasan says he makes £50-60 for an eight- or nine-hour shift. “On a busy day, sometimes £70. In a week I can make £350.” He hasn’t got a Bangladesh sticker for the new bike’s front mudguard yet, but he does have something to look forward to: he’s heading there at the end of the month to see his wife. They married in 2023, but she can’t join him in the UK. “Unless you earn good money, you cannot bring your spouse. You have to be earning nearly £30,000, and you can’t earn this money doing a delivery job.”
There’s a reason illegal e-bikes are illegal: they’re dangerous – to other people on the road, to pedestrians, often to the riders themselves. Still, looking at the bigger picture – of an industry that exploits vulnerable people while making huge profits, and online marketplaces that sell unsafe products with no liability or retribution – it’s hard to see a 21-year-old from Bangladesh, struggling to make the minimum wage, as the bad guy in this story.
